This copy is for your personal non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies of Toronto Star content for distribution to colleagues, clients or customers, or inquire about permissions/licensing, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com

The shadowy world of a one-time Toronto millionaire is the latest story in a Star investigation into legal loopholes exploited by child sex tourists.

By Robert Cribb, Jennifer Quinn and Julian SherInvestigative News reporters

Mon., April 1, 2013

“It takes a long time for people to understand these are pictures of real kids. If they saw their own kids in these pictures it’d be a different story.”

Det. Const. Jeff Kidd of

Toronto police’s child exploitation unit

Matthew Sheard’s distinguished family lineage flows from an early Toronto mayor to one of the city’s first medical officers of health to contemporaries who include a respected physician brother and a cousin who sat on the bench of Ontario’s Superior Court of Justice.

Matthew himself spent his career as a lawyer in Toronto.

But in his private life, the retired 83-year-old inhabited a shadowy, scandalized world far from his esteemed family.

While his story has never been reported, police say Sheard’s string of convictions for creating child pornography featuring young boys overseas provides a case study in how sexual predators can exploit the justice system and leave behind a trail of victims.

“He’s got every creepy aspect behind him,” says Det. Const. Jeff Kidd with the Toronto police’s child exploitation unit, who led the Sheard investigation. “He didn’t have any issues about what he was doing.”

An ongoing Star investigation into child sex tourists has uncovered a system rife with loopholes that fails to track convicted sex offenders leaving the country, inform foreign authorities of their impending arrival or give Canadian border authorities access to the sexual offender registry that would flag their arrival back in Canada.

On four occasions between 2000 and 2010, while in his 70s, Sheard was convicted for various offences related to sexually exploiting young boys and breaching his probation — a decade of repeated travel abroad in which he exploited children and young men, according to his arrest record and interviews with Toronto police.

Sheard, now living in a rooming house in downtown Toronto, declined the Star’s request for an interview.

His run-ins with police for seeking sexual gratification with children overseas began in the winter of 2000, when he spent six months in a Thai prison for exploitation of young boys, according to interviews with Kidd and Sheard’s retired judge cousin, Joseph Sheard.

“He was involved in juvenile pornography,” said the 89-year-old Joseph Sheard, who for a time acted as a surety for his cousin, with whom he continues to communicate.

“I found the idea of sexual connection with boys positively horrifying and most distasteful … But you don’t talk people out of it who have that predilection.”

The first reference to Sheard in Canadian police records is in 2002, and again in 2004, when Toronto police recorded his name in “occurrence reports,” the details of which are not public.

The Ontario Provincial Police also registered Sheard in a separate occurrence in 2004.

His first arrest came in 2006 after Sheard visited a Stratford photo shop to get vacation photos of young boys enlarged.

A store clerk, alarmed by the images, called local police.

The resulting conviction for “corrupting morals” came with a $1,000 fine.

His plea on a relatively minor charge meant his name wasn’t placed on the province’s sexual offender’s registry and he faced no limits on his ability to travel abroad.

“They treated it very mildly at the time,” Kidd said. “It takes a long time for people to understand these are pictures of real kids. If they saw their own kids in these pictures it’d be a different story.”

The fine did little to alter Sheard’s behaviour, a police report from 2009 says: “This did not stop (Sheard) from possessing child pornography, he only made more.”

During what police call one of his frequent — and extended — trips after that conviction, he continued to exploit young boys, says Kidd.

“Usually he flew into Thailand and jumped to Cambodia. He had people there who would provide the kids and he kept them in certain hotels … It was give and take. He has something they don’t have and they have something he didn’t have.”

Sheard exchanged hundreds of written letters with Thai boys who referred to him as “papa.” He, in turn, referred to them in letters obtained by police as his “f--- boys.”

“He probably had 50 pounds of pictures (with him) when he came back,” says Kidd. “But he never got searched.”

The border agents at Canadian airports who do the preliminary passport checks do not have access to the Canadian police database that contains criminal records.

Sheard’s lifestyle was financed through a seven-figure inheritance he received at the age of 17 when his physician father died, leaving him a millionaire property owner, says Sheard’s cousin Joseph.

The inheritance included four duplexes in Forest Hill and uptown Toronto and half of his father’s fortune, which he shared with a half-brother physician named Charles, now dead.

“He used to be regarded as rich uncle Matt when he had all that property,” his cousin recalls.

But over time Sheard’s wealth gradually slipped away.

“He went into the world and became a multi-millionaire but then he made some bad investments, one after another . … He bought real estate and sold it at a loss about four or five times.”

On April 3, 2008, Sheard boarded Cathay Pacific Airline flight 827 from Pearson International Airport, landing at Hong Kong International Airport. A second Cathay Pacific flight — 701 — landed in Bangkok two days later with Sheard on board, says a detailed arrest record obtained by the Star.

He spent several days in Thailand before moving on to Vietnam and Cambodia.

Sheard accessed boys as young as 8 in these countries through a “third party,” the police report says.

He would supply them with food and alcohol and then take photographs of them with erections and, in some cases, take “plaster casts of the erect penis.”

He would then bring the photos and casts back to Toronto to add to his collection, says Kidd.

After two months, Sheard boarded a Cathay Pacific flight back to Toronto via Hong Kong and Anchorage, Alaska.

A camera seized by police in Sheard’s luggage contained a 35-mm film that contained 17 photographs. Among them was the image of an Asian boy aged between 8 and 10, the police report says, “with his hands over his head and his pants down around his knees. The boys’ genitals are clearly visible.”

The rest of the pictures contained undressed adult males with erections posing for the camera.

The police arrest report at the time says Sheard, then 78 years old, “readily admits he is a gay male and gay people do these types of things. He states he regularly goes to Thailand for a couple of months at a time. He states that he is not a sex tourist or a pedophile.”

The investigation found Sheard also travelled to Vietnam and Cambodia “for only one reason … This accused has been exploiting children for years to satisfy his sexual interests. He not only possesses child pornography, but he makes his own child pornography through the hands-on sexual abuse of children.”

Sheard revealed no signs of remorse for “years of child abuse,” the report says. “It almost appears that the accused has adopted an attitude of ‘I don’t care.’”

In March 2009, he pleaded to child pornography charges and was sentenced to 43 days in jail (in addition to the 101 days already served) and given a three-year probation, court documents show.

“To cross the border with that kind of stuff in your suitcase doesn’t show much common sense,” says Joseph Sheard. “It was idiotic.”

That 2009 conviction finally placed Sheard’s name on the sexual offender registry — but that did little to deter his travel.

While he couldn’t get a Canadian passport after release from jail, that didn’t stop him from flying to Grenada with a Grenadian passport he easily obtained, says Kidd.

His now-deceased brother Charles had a home on the island where the two spent time together, says Joseph.

But while the Grenadian passport got Sheard out of the country, it couldn’t get him back in.

“It wasn’t accepted by the U.S., where he had to go through,” says Kidd. “So he sent his brother back (to Toronto), who is 91 years old, who made an application to Passport Canada and Foreign Affairs saying, ‘I can’t sustain my life without my care provider.’ ”

With an emergency Canadian passport in hand, Sheard returned from Grenada to Toronto in 2010 when he re-emerged on the police radar.

“When Foreign Affairs took his passport application and realized he was banned, they contacted (Canadian Border Services Agency) and they alerted us when he’d be coming back through Pearson,” says Kidd.

Peel Regional Police at Pearson were standing by.

“That’s when he got caught coming into the country with more images of (naked) kids,” says Kidd. “Peel Regional Police did their investigation and determined it didn’t fit the definition of child pornography but it fit the definition of breach under his probation, which is that he isn’t able to have any pornography at all.”

Sheard’s plea resulted in another 30 days in jail (in addition to 60 days of pre-sentence custody) and another three-year probation.

Today, Sheard lives in a rooming house on Carlton St. in Toronto.

The $1,400 pension he lives on — almost entirely consumed by his $1,200 monthly rent — has left him a long way away from the life of privilege and wealth he once had, says his cousin.

“I don’t have that much feeling for him. I feel an obligation to him because he’s my cousin and because there are no other people to do anything for him. He has no friends.”

These days, their contact is limited. Joseph and his wife take Matthew for dinner on occasion.

“He’s not the most entertaining person and I don’t count the days until I see him.”

More from the Toronto Star & Partners

LOADING

Copyright owned or licensed by Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or distribution of this content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited and/or its licensors. To order copies of Toronto Star articles, please go to: www.TorontoStarReprints.com